Scott Ellsworth | The Secret Game: A Wartime Story of Courage, Change, and Basketball’s Lost Triumph
In 1944, 20 years before the height of the civil rights movement, an all-Black basketball team from the North Carolina College for Negroes—now known as North Carolina Central University, or NCCU—and an all-white team of Duke University medical school students put their lives on the line to meet at the NCCU gym for a clash of the titans.
At the time, the idea of a Black team competing against a white team was unheard of in collegiate sports, especially for teams in the Jim Crow South. Earlier that same year, Booker T. Spicely, a Black military veteran, was killed by a white bus driver in Durham for not moving quickly enough to the back of the bus. But at the time, word had spread about the two teams’ dominance against their respective competition. The gauntlet was thrown, and the teams met on a Sunday morning while most of Durham, including the police, attended church.
The doors were bolted shut to prevent intruders. A reporter for The Carolina Times got wind of the monumental competition but swore not to cover it. The teams played two games that day: The first was a rout by the Eagles over Duke—88 to 44. The second, even more surprising game was a scrimmage in which both teams pooled their players together, mixed up their lineups, and played side-by-side with people from the opposite race.
The history of the event remained underground for decades before author and historian Scott Ellsworth stumbled across a record of the game while talking with John McLendon, the Eagles’ longtime coach, including during the 1944 clash with Duke. Ellsworth scrapped the book he was then drafting, about the 1957 men’s basketball Final Four, and pivoted to exploring the history of basketball and Durham through this “secret game.”
Ellsworth wrote his first book, in 1982, about the Tulsa race massacre. He wouldn’t publish again until The Secret Game hit shelves in 2015, but he has an extensive record covering social justice. In recognition of the barrier-breaking game’s 80th anniversary, the INDY called Ellsworth to discuss his unlikely path to becoming an author, early Durham history, and what still surprises him about his book.
INDY: You wrote your first book, Death in a Promised Land, in 1982, but The Secret Game, your second book, wasn’t published until 2015. Were you always interested in being an author?
ELLSWORTH: I decided I didn’t want to be an academic. I was trying to figure out if there was a book that I could write that would have some commercial potential, but I also didn’t have enough self-confidence. I wasn’t exactly sure how to do any of this. A friend of mine who had been an academic said you have to unlearn everything you’ve learned in graduate school to write for a general public. So I think that took a while. I was at the Smithsonian for 10 years, and that taught me a lot. It taught me that, you know, the American people are actually very interested in our history. It’s just they’re not interested in the way that college professors talk about it.
What inspired you to write about the secret game?
Even though I’d been a basketball fan growing up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, when I came to Durham in 1976 I caught the ACC disease—the disease for which there is no cure. And obviously I became a huge Duke fan but also an ACC fan. I was living in DC, and I noticed how well John Feinstein’s book on Bob Knight did. And I thought, well, gosh, maybe there’s something there.
There was a saying in those days in New York publishing circles about sports books, which was “The smaller the ball, the better the book.” And it was kind of true. I mean, because there was a wonderful literature of baseball, all about fathers and sons and autumn and death and all the poetry and all this stuff. The literature of golf was pretty good. The tennis literature’s good, but the books on basketball and football on the whole were not very good.
So I started digging into that. And the question that came up early was, nobody really described how basketball changed in the 1920s and ’30s. The games were like chess matches. They’re completely slow and dull. Then by the time I’m growing up in the 1960s you have this acrobatic game.
And I knew that race was going to be a big factor, but I didn’t think it was going to be the only factor. So I start digging into this and do tons of research. I [thought,] “I finally have my story.” I was going to write a book about the 1957 Final Four, which was the University of San Francisco, the two-time defending national champion, though without Bill Russell; Michigan State, which was integrated; the University of Kansas (KU), the greatest tradition in the history of college basketball, [which] had the most sought-after high school player ever in Wilt Chamberlain; and then the still-segregated University of North Carolina.
And I thought, “This is great. There are triple overtimes, lots of incidents. Television is coming in. The civil rights movement has begun.” Also, money is coming in, you know—Wilt Chamberlain shows up in Lawrence driving a brand-new Cadillac that he didn’t get washing dishes in North Philadelphia.
It took years. I mean, we were broke. I went to all the schools, interviewed the players and coaches, all this stuff, and had this book all ready to write it.
But it sounds like the 1957 Final Four book never made it to the final draft?
I made a mistake, which was I went to the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts, because they had a pretty good library, and I was up there for a long weekend. They were having an induction ceremony. Hardly anyone was there, but I sort of wandered down after being bleary-eyed looking at microfilm for four hours, and was sitting in the back of the library when this elderly African American gentleman sidled up to me, and it’s John McLendon.
I’m thinking, I know he’s in the Basketball Hall of Fame for something, and I can’t remember what. And then he starts talking about how he had personally known James Naismith. This is in the 1990s. I’m like, you knew James Naismith? McLendon was part of this handful of Black undergrads at KU in the 1930s. I’m thinking, you know, “I really ought to interview this McLendon guy for backstory for the Kansas basketball part of the ’57 Final Four book.” I call the sports editor at The New York Times, and I say, ‘Hey, Neil, I want to write a piece about John McLendon.’ He says, “Who the hell’s John McLendon?”
I go to Cleveland Heights, Ohio, and I interview him. We had a wonderful interview for three hours or something, mainly focusing on the ’40s and ’50s and how hard it was for Black coaches to go to away games and things like that. And then at the end, he goes upstairs and says, “Oh, wait, I got something to show you.”
it was exactly that moment that all those years of work on the 1957 Final Four got torpedoed forever to sink beneath the waves, and I was off on a search for the secret game.”
And he came back down, he’s got this typescript piece of paper, three or four pages long, and at the top it says, “Racial firsts in basketball I’ve been involved with by John B. McLendon Jr.” And as you know, I mean, what didn’t he do? First Black Olympic coach, first African American coach to win a national championship, first African American assistant Olympic coach, on and on. But at the top, it says, “1944 first integrated college game in the South: North Carolina College for Negroes” versus, he put, “Duke Navy Medical School team.”
I’m thinking, you know, this guy sure as hell can’t type, because there’s no way it’s 1944. I say, “Hey, Coach, what year was this, really?” And it was exactly that moment that all those years of work on the 1957 Final Four got torpedoed forever to sink beneath the waves, and I was off on a search for the secret game.
How much did you know about Durham before the book?
I showed up in Durham in the fall of 1976 driving out from Oregon to come to graduate school at Duke. I’d never been to the state of North Carolina. It was all brand new to me. Durham was just a completely different town than it is today—I mean, downtown was dead. There were just empty buildings. There was nothing going on. There were hardly any restaurants, not that, you know, a graduate student could afford any. But there was still a Faulknerian quality to it with these old mansions I’d lived in once in a while, and things are just crumbling and falling apart, and you just felt like you’re in Absalom, Absalom!
I found Durham didn’t match the images I had of the South, but it was a sad place. I knew about the tobacco factories and the cotton factories. I did some research on a textile strike back in the ’50s, mainly in Henderson. I had a sense of the significance of the African American community and the power in the community, but not much more. I did know a woman who was a secretary at the history department, and her family had some relationship to [Herman] Lee Council, the bus driver who murdered [Booker T.] Spicely.
Did you know Booker T. Spicely has a historical marker now on Club Boulevard?
Yeah, they reached out to me and I came down. I know that there’s a little secret game mural kind of hidden downtown [Editor’s note: this mural is located next to the Durham Arts Council], which is kind of cool. But there’s a group in town who’s been talking about trying to get a Secret Game state historical site marker. I think that’d be great. John McLendon deserves one. There’s a lot of markers that we don’t have that we need.
In a Guardian interview, you said of the interview subjects for your first book, “They had never been interviewed before. They didn’t talk about the massacre in their own family. I ended up being their witness. It didn’t have to be me. It could have been you or somebody else. It just happened to be me.” What do you think that you specifically brought to the table when trying to tell the story of the secret game?
The Tulsa work was excellent training for things. I was born two months before the Brown decision in 1954. I didn’t have a Black classmate until I was in high school. They managed to dawdle for a long time. We had this great skeleton in the closet in Tulsa that nobody talked about.
I got very lucky with certain people willing to open up to me, particularly survivors of the massacre who realized that my interest was sincere and legitimate, and they took a chance on me. That was very good training in terms of combing through all these written records and saying, “There could be a story here that could have a larger significance.” And I knew that I had to get as many people who were involved, or adults at the time who could help shed light on life and the culture, and I just got very lucky with that. Again, it could have been someone else, but it wasn’t. It turned out to be me.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Follow Reporter Justin Laidlaw on X or send an email to [email protected]. Comment on this story at [email protected].